Welcome to the new campustimes.org.

The Campus Times staff has worked hard on a responsive web redesign. Please bear with us as some older content may be temporarilily unavailable. To submit feedback, or to report an issue, email the Web Staff at online@campustimes.org.

Dora and the Lost Ark: Closure

Harrison Ford, playing Indiana Jones, just tackled Dora and started yelling at her right before she turned to camera and signalled to her producer to cut to commercial.

Suzie didn’t notice as her dads left the room, arguing whether they should let her keeping watching what was, at best, an unconventional episode of Dora

Before they had reached a conclusion, however, the episode was back, and they knew better than to try and tear Suzie from the TV mid-episode.

Dora had the situation back under control. As a concession to Indy, to calm him down, she had agreed to keep the cameras off for the long trip to Nepal, only resuming the episode once they got there.

She immediately regretted it. As soon as they got to Nepal, Indy headed straight to a bar.

“Come on, we’re meeting my contact here,” he said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were supposed to be filming a children’s show.

They were early, so while they were waiting, and as long as the cameras were off, Dora did the only thing she could think of to tolerate this otherwise trying day.

“Whiskey sour,” she told the bartender, “straight up.”

“Aren’t you a little young for that, missy?” asked the bartender.

“I’m a little person, you bigot,” she said, pulling out her ID that confirmed her age as 27.

They saw Indy’s contact, Marion, headed toward the bar, so Dora downed the rest of her drink and gave the camera guys a finger roll to indicate that they should start filming.

Resuming her TV voice, that blood-curdling banshee-sucking-a-helium-balloon squeal whose echoes kept her up at night, Dora turned to the cameras to address her waiting viewers.

“We have to talk to Indy’s friend Marion to get a staff that will help us find the Ark!”

She didn’t like how familiar Marion and Indy were acting, but he got the staff from her quickly enough, so Dora was willing to put up with it.

Dora was glad to leave the bar, but just as things were starting to go smoothly, the whole thing fell to shit almost immediately. It all started when she heard a sound behind them.

A rustle and a stick breaking underfoot as they were walking by some bushes — every Dora fan knows what that means.

“Uh oh!” Dora said. “That sounds like Swiper! He must want to take the staff!”

She was pretty sure Swiper wasn’t scheduled until later, but he had been getting more erratic after his third wife left him for a hound. They had found it easier to just work around whatever he could give them.

“Can you help us stop Swiper by saying, ‘Swiper, no swiping?’”

Repeat it for the inattentive little bastards, she had to remind herself as the second whiskey sour starting to kick in.

“Say, ‘Swiper no swiping!’”

Just then a burst of machine gun fire had the whole group ducking for cover.

“That’s no fox, that’s a Kraut!” Indy yelled.

Dora cringed on the inside. So much for being a show about breaking down cultural barriers.

“They must have known we were after the staff. He’s probably been on our tail since before the bar,” said Indy.

He may be a pain in the ass, but Dora had to admit, he did keep his cool under pressure.

Little did she know how much things were about to get worse.

“It seems like there’s only one,” Indy said. “But since we spotted him he’s probably going to call for backup. We can’t let that happen.”

Backpack had fallen off when they dove for cover, and before Dora could react, Indy grabbed him and lobbed him like a grenade 30 feet to their left.

“That should draw his fire for a minute!” Indy yelled over the sound of the machine gun fire that confirmed his idea.

Drawing a pistol, Indy stood up from his crouch and fired three quick rounds at the source of the rat-tat-tat that was rattling Dora’s increasingly inebriated head.

The machine gun fired stopped. After Dora found Backpack (unscathed, thank God), she ventured nervously out of the brush. A pool of blood was slowly emerging from the bushes on the other side of the path. Indy spun his gun around his finger, Old West–style, and holstered it, with a smug look of satisfaction on his face.

This was the last straw for Dora. This asshole had been making a mockery of her show since the moment he set foot on set, and Dora was done with him. Her professionalism had carried her through to this point, but between his increasing arrogance and the two whiskey sours coursing through every artery of her two-foot-tall frame, Dora was ready to tell him off.

Knowing he didn’t give a damn what she thought, she had to think of how best to generate an outrage that would actually hurt him. Thinking quickly, she turned to the camera, making the critical eye contact that granted her whiny vocalizations access to her young viewers’ souls.

“Oh my God, Indy killed a Nazi!¡Indy mató un Nazi!”

She smiled inwardly as she pictured the little brutes’ parents faces at this moment.

“Can you say, ‘Indy mató un Nazi?’”

This was the point when Angus and Bartholomew agreed: Suzie should not be watching this. Her TV and millions of others harshly cut to black, angry calls started rolling in, and Dora’s director yelled cut (no need to keep rolling with no one watching anymore).

Seeing her plan but too late to stop it, Indy yelled for the cameras to turn back on — contractually, he couldn’t get paid if they didn’t finish the episode. But the producers were so busy calling advertisers and trying to convince them not to drop the show that they didn’t even hear Indy’s complaints. So he turned to Dora herself.

“What did you do that for!” he screamed, an exclamation more than a question, his face flushed as he realized he was outwitted by her.

“My show, my rules,” she replied, nonchalant, relishing her power over him.

“You’re a stubborn little bitch, just like your mother!” he lashed out. “I told her we should have used a condom!”

But she was already out of earshot, strolling back to the bar from earlier. She didn’t know if the show would be cancelled or not after her stunt, but that was a problem for later. Right now she wanted to find that bartender again. He was an asshole, but he was cute. The other bartender wasn’t as cute, but he was nicer. She wasn’t sure which one she was more interested in.

Gun control has been in the news for the last few weeks because of the Parkland shooting, but there’s been a lack of critical analysis on what gun control would and wouldn’t accomplish, and what would really need to be done to stop mass shootings.